The Allure of Pop Music

A Guide for the Uninitiated

Introduction

My favorite genre of music is pop music. Even though many people love pop music, I’ve learned that this makes me a bit of a unicorn among Serious Music Fans. Because when I tell people this, I usually get a mixed reception. The first common reaction is one of disdain. “Ew,” they might say. “I only listen to prog rock. Pop music is lame.” Another, kinder reaction is one of attempted understanding. “Oh, I like some pop music, too,” they might say. “You mean good pop, right, like Rina Sawayama and Lana del Rey. I just don’t like all that Top 40 stuff.” But when I clarify that, no, I do mean that Top 40 stuff, I’m often met with dismissiveness or just straight up confusion. In this post, I’d like to explain myself — why care about pop music when there’s so much other “more interesting” music out there?

First, I’ll introduce two mainstream ways to analyze music: rockism and poptimism. I’ll give some context for these ideologies, explain how they’ve influenced modern-day musical discourse, and show why they aren’t necessarily suited to favor pop music. Next, I’ll talk about an alternative way to engage with music: stan culture. I’ll explain why it is so different from rockism / poptimism and why people with this view tend to gravitate towards pop. Finally, I’ll take you on a brief tour of stan culture and what it looks like in practice. After all of that, I should have an answer to your question.

Sound good? Let’s dive in.

Part I: Rockism & Poptimism

For the purposes of this essay, it’s important for us to have a shared definition of pop music. Defining pop music is no easy task, and many attempts come up short. I like the definition on Rate Your Music, a website that is a genre authority of sorts:

“Pop” is an umbrella of popular styles closely tied to mass production and mass marketing, focusing on catchiness and accessibility through melody, rhythm, lyrics, and hooks.

This definition works because it avoids an overly strict sonic definition. Pop music is defined less by how it’s made and more by who’s it made for. Because of this, the sound of pop music is always in flux. Easily marketable music now is different from easily marketable music in 1923, and it will also be different from easily marketable music in 2123. Pop music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The only way that the concept of pop music can exist is when it is grounded in a certain cultural context.

In light of this definition, there are clear reasons for people to be pop music-averse:

1. Pop music is destined to be most popular amongst people who don’t care about music that much. If you don’t care as much about music, you will probably default to whatever is “on”: in other words, the pop music of your era. So if people are very intentional about cultivating their own music taste, they may want to distance themselves from the favorite music of people who are not.

2. Pop music tends to be same-y sounding. Because the range of sounds that can get popular on the radio is narrower than the range of all sounds, pop music ends up being sonically constrained. So there’s usually less to “discover” upon repeat listens, especially for a more discerning audience.

3. Pop music tends to appeal to “base” human instincts. It does not require much thought from the listener to be enjoyed. Pop music uses simple song structures and often taps into visceral urges, like sexual desire. At the same time, it’s not exactly drenched in meaning or moral messaging. It’s like junk food!

In other words, pop music is for plebs. For these reasons and more, pop music struggled to gain recognition from the critics of High Art in the mid-20th century. Critics argued that “pop hits reside[d] on a lower aesthetic plane”¹. Rock and roll (which was under the umbrella of pop at the time) was similarly dismissed. This frustrated diehard rock fans, who knew that rock music could be just as meaningful as classical music or jazz. If only the gatekeepers of culture could see what they saw!

However, in order to win recognition, rock music fans needed to come up with an entirely new framework to evaluate music. Remember that what critics valued in the 1950s is totally different from what music critics value today. Classical music analysis emphasizes highly theoretical content, like novel chord progressions and complex orchestration. Rock music analysis emphasizes completely different themes, like authenticity, social commentary, and lyrical depth. In the early days of rock criticism, articulating these themes to society’s tastemakers was a critically important goal.

This goal led to rockism², a movement that became the dominant mode in music criticism for the latter half of the 20th century. The Beatles laid the groundwork for rockism with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an early concept album (a set of tracks intended to be greater than the sum of its parts). Sgt. Pepper was an ambitious work: one that captured the current cultural moment through a dizzying array of musical and literary themes. The clear artistry on display was enough to finally push critical acceptance of rock music into the mainstream.

According to Wikipedia, “rockism is the belief that rock music is dependent on values such as authenticity and artfulness, and that such values elevate the genre over other forms of popular music”. But rockism is so much more than that. Everything that we think of when we think of music criticism today: social commentary, clever lyricism, album cohesion; all of it has roots in rockism.

It’s important to understand that rock fans didn’t call their movement “rockism” at the time; in fact, the term rockism has a negative connotation. The term was coined by an anti-rockist (Pete Wylie) in the 1990s to draw attention to the gatekeeping and elitism prominent in music discourse. In the past, rockism tried to distance rock from other forms of popular music to gain critical acceptance. But once rockism became the dominant strain of criticism, if anything it committed even harder to its anti-pop roots. In other words, rockism lived long enough to see itself become the villain.

Many journalists in the 1990s and 2000s argued that the dismissiveness of rockism was fueled by more than just a commitment to artistic standards: uglier factors were at play. In “The Rap Against Rockism”, journalist Kelefa Sanneh argued that rockism was now out of touch — it reflected a conservative White male way of looking at the world that is at odds with how most people consume music. Sanneh alludes to “Disco Demolition Night”: a riot in which anti-disco rock music fans destroyed thousands of disco records in the stands of a baseball stadium. Most scholars believe that this event was not just about the music — it also had racist and homophobic undertones.

Sanneh’s challenge to rockism laid the foundation for a rival movement: poptimism. Poptimism is “the belief that pop music is as worthy of professional critique and interest as rock music”. In other words, pop should be judged by the same standards as rock, not just dismissed out of hand because of its more corporate origins. In the following years, the changing musical landscape allowed poptimism to gain traction: as rock music was forced to compete with more genres, rockists began to fall out of step with what was actually popular. In addition, the introduction of streaming meant that more and more different kinds of pop music were accessible to listeners. With so much pop out there, it became more difficult to dismiss pop in broad strokes.

In 2023, it is clear that poptimism has won out. It is the dominant force in music journalism today: even tastemaking magazine Pitchfork covers plenty of pop music (sometimes quite favorably) despite its hipster angle. Some even argue that poptimism has gone too far. But poptimist views would never have been able to gain traction without the rockism of the 1960s.

Despite their opposing origins, I would argue that rockism and poptimism are part of the same movement. Both sought to establish acceptance for their namesake genre by adopting a similar set of artistic standards. Poptimism wasn’t a reinvention of music criticism in the same way that rockism was; it still riffed on the same ideas. There are a few ideas in the rockist framework that aren’t as present in poptimism, such as celebrating the “lone genius” or sticking to an artistic vision rather than “embracing the system”. But in most ways, poptimism took rockism to its natural conclusion, expanding its set of standards to be even more inclusive of popular culture.

Furthermore, pop music fandom does not align super well with either of these views. Both rockists and poptimists value things like artistry and authenticity, which the pop industry is not optimized to create. So poptimists are still unlikely to say their favorite genre is pop without qualification, since doing so would imply approval of less artistic “bad Top 40 stuff” as well. In the end, neither rockism nor poptimism reflects how most pop music fans engage with music. For that, we will need to introduce another lens that emphasizes different themes.

Part II: Beyond Poptimism

Now that we understand rockism and poptimism, we can think about what might be different. How might we talk about pop music outside of a poptimist framework?

Our answer is buried in the aforementioned “The Rap Against Rockism”. Like many poptimists, Sanneh asserts that “to obsess over old-fashioned stand-alone geniuses is to forget that lots of the most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces”. Sanneh goes on to add that “a lot of great music is created because of those things”. The poptimist angle is that pop can flourish despite those barriers — within this imperfect industry there are hidden gems.

But for many pop fans, the “things” Sanneh regrets are important in their own right. Pop fandom is not just about the music: it’s about everything else, too. Whether it be aesthetics, marketing, or chart performance, pop fans embrace everything.

Pop fans contextualize this everything with the term era. An “era” is a specific phase of an artist's career, usually associated with a certain aesthetic and sound. It's a concept that combines music with the image of the artist, carefully curated to appeal to a mass audience. You might have heard the term in the context of Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour", or perhaps the slang term "flop era." Eras are usually tied to the release of a certain album, but they don’t have to be. For instance, The Weeknd's After Hours era covered the release period of not just the After Hours album, but also its sequel, Dawn FM.

In pop circles, the era is the standard unit of musical critique. You might hear a fan say something like, “oh I really liked MARINA’s Electra Heart era”. Eras are similar to albums, but the distinction totally changes how music is discussed. First of all, era discussion focuses on a wider range of topics. While album discussion dives deep into everything about the songs: musical creativity, lyrical content, and the making of, era discussion goes beyond that. Era is more about the artist’s persona, their narrative, and how they fit into the pop culture landscape.

There’s also a difference in the timing of discussion. Even though many albums are reviewed as soon as they come out, the most interesting album criticism takes time to mature. If an album is impactful enough, it might still be generating active analysis years if not decades after its release.

In contrast, eras are about the current moment. An era is like a summer blockbuster. Imagine if you saw Avengers a decade after release, never having been alive during its heyday. Sure, you might get something out of it. But you wouldn’t get the experience of talking about it excitedly with your friends in 2012 as it rises to become the biggest movie in the world. The same is true for eras: it’s hard to fully appreciate them without being immersed in a certain cultural time and context.

Eras have technically existed since the start of rockism. The Beatles, for instance, had several distinct periods of their career, which were characterized by unique sounds, aesthetics, and thematic elements. However, the modern term “era” doesn’t quite fit. The modern era was only made possible by the Internet.

Before the Internet, the pop industry was a one-way street. Fans received whatever was broadcast on television or radio and whatever was sold in stores. Perhaps a magazine might reveal some juicy details, but generally record labels had total control over an artist's image and narrative. During this time, pop music was neatly packaged, mystifying, and impersonal. You could listen to it, but you couldn't see its inner workings, unlike the local rock music that you could see up close and personal.

But in our post-Internet world, these inner workings have been laid bare. If a mistake is made or a scandal breaks out, it immediately becomes fodder for social media and news sites. Labels can try to play down the story, but not before fans worldwide have dissected every detail. Pop stars now have Twitter at their fingertips, often leaving agents scrambling to do damage control. There is so much more to unpack now, so much more to explore. In a way, the roles of mysterious corporate pop music and straightforward independent rock music have been reversed. The smaller music scenes are now more mysterious, while pop music thrives on a constant stream of information and continuous online interaction between artists and fans. This new frontier of analysis led to the emergence of a unique online ecosystem: stan culture.

Part III: A Survey of Stan Culture

Stan culture is the world of stans, which are defined by Urban Dictionary as “very very overzealous and obsessed fans”. The term originates from a disturbing Eminem song about an obsessed fan, which has given the term a negative connotation outside of pop circles. But an overly literal interpretation of the term tells you nothing about how a stan is different from any other kind of fan. You can’t be a “stan” of, say, Elon Musk in anything but an ironic sense. To be a part of stan culture is to engage with the art of a public figure in a very particular way.

Specifically, stans are the pop fans that I described in Part II: appreciators of not just music, but the aesthetics, persona, narrative, and marketing associated with it. Those who criticize stan culture often characterize it as just another aspect of celebrity culture, lacking in serious substance. This is a view that rockists and poptimists often use to distance themselves from stans: just imagine a rockist’s reaction if someone told them, “oh, so you’re like a Swiftie?”.³ But while it’s true that many aspects of stan culture are not especially serious, reducing stans to superficial celebrity gossipers overlooks the interesting things that they have to contribute to popular culture.

In my experience, being a stan is less like being a gossiper and more like being a diehard sports fan. You get excited when your favorite pop star scores a big break and get sad when they lose (AKA flop). You defend them from people who want to see them fail. You might be surprised to see how fierce the rivalry between groups of stans can get: look no further than the infamous Swifties / KatyCats feud that drove Taylor Swift and Katy Perry to reconcile. Being a stan and being a sports fan are both about appreciating the journey that your fav takes you on and living vicariously through them, whether that be an artist or a sports team.

Needing a discussion forum, stans chose Twitter as their platform of choice. Twitter was a natural place for stans to congregate; not only was it a place where their beloved pop artists actually lived, but it also had a format that was conducive to the snippy back-and-forths that now characterize the spiciest pop music discourse.

Stan Twitter, the current center of pop music discourse, has a dubious reputation. It’s a mysterious place for the uninitiated — like many young and online spaces, it’s steeped in irony, in-jokes, and memes that can require months of immersion to understand. Stan Twitter also has a connection to the LGBTQ community for a number of reasons: its anonymous nature, its appreciation of femininity, and its culture of support and belonging, to name a few. Many words and phrases now associated with Stan Twitter actually have their roots in the Black queer community.

But Stan Twitter is best known for threatening incidents perpetuated by faceless community members. The (8/10!) Pitchfork review of Taylor Swift’s folklore caused writer Jill Mapes to receive death threats from angry stans who demanded a 10. Freelance writer Wanna Thompson lost her job after her anti-Nicki tweet unleashed the Barbz, Nicki Minaj’s fearsome following of fans. Incidents like these have driven a constant stream of bad press from mainstream media.

And the journalists have a point! Stan Twitter does have a dark side, and many people have been negatively affected by it (including the artists themselves). But when most journalists cover Stan Twitter, it seems like they’ve already made up their mind. They don’t try to understand what motivates Twitter stans, often painting them as a mindless horde. Ultimately, this unbalanced coverage primes people to be unreceptive to stan culture and all the weird and wonderful things that come out of it.

But Stan Twitter is still chaotic and messy, so other communities have sprung up to facilitate different kinds of discussion (some more Stan Twitter-y than others). One of the most interesting pop forums (and perhaps the most accessible / least Stan Twitter-y) is r/popheads, a subreddit for all things pop music. Popheads features a variety of different pop-related activities, like album rate threads and a personalized community version of the Billboard Hot 100. Popheads is unique because it is a bridge between poptimism and stan culture. It was founded by ex-members of r/indieheads, a distinctly poptimist community that was not receptive to their love of Carly Rae Jepsen’s sophomore album EMOTION. Since then, it has been slowly accruing more stan culture influence as it grows in popularity and interacts with the Twitter community. But popheads has so far been able to hold onto its unique identity.

On the more Stan Twitter-y side of things, there are forums like ATRL and Popjustice. These communities resemble Stan Twitter, but the higher barrier to entry centers the discussion around the interests of more dedicated fans. (ATRL locks registration periodically due to server load.) And without non-members there to stir up trouble, the chaos is more easily contained. Finally, there’s a lot of interesting discussion that goes on in artist-specific fan communities, especially with the rise of Discord. These communities are so new and buried that it’s difficult to say about them.

Away from the chaos of Stan Twitter, it is easier to identify the different types of people that make up the world of stan culture. One of the more interesting ones is the chart people. Chart people are the baseball fans of stan culture — they’re interested in how many units artists sell, variance in regional performance, and projecting future song success. We also have the production buffs. Production buffs have lots of overlap with the poptimists, but they often focus on producers as a force in the pop industry just as much as creators of their own art. This is just a taste of the many different types of people that participate in stan culture, and I hope this challenges the “mindless horde” idea that you might already be primed to see.

In 2023, stan culture continues to evolve. Perhaps the biggest development is the increasingly global nature of Stan Twitter. K-pop and BTS in particular blew the door wide open for global stan culture and already has some of the most recognizable stans (the ARMY) on the planet. And I already mentioned Discord — while not yet created during the early days of stan culture, Discord has proven to be a platform that pairs nicely with stan culture discussion. Who knows what new (and current!) technologies might change stan culture in the future?

I could spend pages and pages talking about the ins and outs of stan culture. I didn’t even get into the personal relationships that celebrities (most notably Nicki Minaj) often cultivate with their fans or what a Stan Twitter conversation even looks like. But all of that would be a poor imitation of something that has to be experienced to be fully understood. Why not just check it out yourself?

Conclusion

So where do I fall into all of this? I strongly identify with r/popheads, straddling the line between stan culture and poptimism. Listening to music for pleasure did not come naturally to me. When I first started listening to music, it wasn’t the albums themselves but the broader cultural narrative that pulled me in. How did artists try to sell their image to the public? What story are they trying to tell and what story do they actually end up telling? What makes or breaks an artist’s career? I became invested in the fake narratives of their own creation, as well as the real stories about climbs to success or falls from grace. Without these key eras to guide me, I doubt I ever would have become as invested in music as I am now.

But I’m also sympathetic to the poptimist view of the world. A lot of pop music kind of sucks from a musical standpoint, and sometimes I just want to listen to something that’s musically impressive! It can be fun to dive deep into an album and talk about stuff like innovative production techniques and lyrical themes. I also think poptimism adds some balance to the dogma of stan culture: you can enjoy something even if it’s “bad art”, and you can dislike something even if it’s “good art”. This dual perspective gives people “permission to enjoy things”, and that’s something I appreciate.

As promised, let’s return to our question from before.

Q: Why care about pop music when there’s so much other “more interesting” music out there?

A: Any music genre can be appreciated for its artistry, but pop music’s stan culture scratches an itch in my brain that no other genre can.

Thanks for reading!

—K

This essay was written with some help from ChatGPT. I would highly recommend it as a writing buddy!

1. https://slate.com/culture/2006/05/does-hating-rock-make-you-a-music-critic.html

2. In this essay, I’m using a broader definition of rockism than is typical. The term “rockism” is generally only used to emphasize elitism towards mainstream music, but I’m also using it to label the movement that won artistic recognition for rock music in the past. The course of the article should make it clear why I chose to do this.

3. “Swiftie” is the term for Taylor Swift stans, perhaps the most visible group of stans today.